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As Leymah
Gbowee stood in front of a crowd of women at her church in Monrovia,
praying for an end to the civil war that was raging in Liberia, she had no idea
of the consequences that were about to unfold.

A specialist in healing from trauma, Gbowee and her allies had spent months visiting
mosques, markets and churches in order to mobilize a nascent peace movement. By
the late summer of 2002, she had become recognized as the leader of Women
of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, which held daily non-violent demonstrations and sit-ins in defiance of
orders from Charles Taylor, the Liberian President at the time.

Eighteen months later, in August 2003, the war was brought
to an end. Gbowee’s efforts, along with those of newly-elected President Ellen
Johnson Sirleaf, were recognized by the award of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize. I
heard Gbowee speak at an
interfaith conference in North Carolina in 2012, where she emphasized that
the main challenge she had faced was not apathy. Liberians were already angry.

The real issue was how to keep well-intentioned people from
exacerbating an already-cruel situation with more violence. Why? Because the
more violence there is, the
more abuses there will be against women and other people. Anger is reasonable and justified in the face
of abuse and exploitation, but what really matters is what we do with it. According to Gbowee, anger
is neutral. We can choose to use it as a fuel for violence or nonviolence.
Liberian women chose the latter, and transformed a civil war into a lasting
peace.

Gbowee’s insights are rooted in a long tradition of
successful nonviolent resistance that runs through the course of history, but
whose teachings
are often ignored. At a special session of the Indian National Congress in
Calcutta in September 1920, Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi maintained that even
non-cooperation with the established order requires nonviolent discipline:

“I have learnt through bitter experience,” he said, that “the one
supreme lesson is to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted
into energy, so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power that can
move the world.”

The women of the Liberian peace movement transformed their
anger into nonviolent power in
situations of brutality that I pray I will never experience: mutilations,
murder and rapes of children and other family members in front of their eyes.
These women had more reason than most other people to turn to violence, but
they did not, giving the lie to those who say that violence is necessary under
such circumstances. This lesson is confirmed by the experiences of many other activists
who have refused to react violently even under extreme pressure, but it is
often forgotten or dismissed.

“Non-violence, being natural, is not noted in history” wrote
Gandhi in his classic text Hind Swaraj.
Modern civilization does not give us the tools to see the subtler effects of
violence and nonviolence. This problem is compounded by the fact that
many of those who use nonviolence to good effect live under the radar screen of
history because they are marginalized. Many systems of privilege condition us
to write off the experiences of those who are not considered to be experts,
like women who are working at the grassroots level or success stories from the
global South. And even when such stories are
recognized, they are often interpreted as arguments for the necessity of
violence. The end of Apartheid in South Africa is an oft-quoted example.

The victory of the African National Congress is
rightly celebrated, but it succeeded in dislodging one system of violence in South Africa and not
violence itself. Structural
violence that feeds through into direct violence - like
poverty, inequality and exploitation - remains largely unaffected. Apartheid
means “apartness,” and that’s what all forms of violence do, by pulling people
apart. The balance between armed struggle and nonviolence as forces that led to
the overthrow of Apartheid has been debated for more than twenty years. Nelson
Mandela, who died on December 5th, internalized this debate in his embrace of both strategies
simultaneously.

For every celebration of armed confrontation
there are many more nonviolent victories in the “anti-apartheid” struggles of
today. The story of Budrus, in the West Bank, is one. By remaining committed to
nonviolence and launching a “women’s contingent” to join the struggle,
Palestinian activist Ayed Morrar and his
fifteen-year old daughter Iltezam were
able to unite members of both Fatah and Hamas in a successful attempt to
protect their village from destruction by Israel’s “Separation Barrier.”

In South Sudan, for example, the world’s newest country,
people are not only learning from the experience of the Liberian women’s
movement, but taking it one step further by institutionalizing nonviolent ways
of dealing with the country’s conflict-ridden transition to independence. A
variety of local
and international groups are collaborating to reduce the potential for
violent conflict by training unarmed civilian peacekeepers to create local
peace teams.

Unarmed
peacekeeping is a good fit for the world’s newest country because it is one
of the latest innovations in conflict transformation. It uses state-of-the-art
knowledge about resolving conflict without the threat or use of weapons, and
trains people in a variety of skills and tactics. They include “nonviolent
accompaniment” and “protective
presence,” in which peacekeepers live and work alongside people who are
threatened; “conflict
mapping”,mediation,
and direct “interposing” - the act of literally getting in between conflicting
parties to deter them from using violence against each other.

The experience of those who use these techniques suggests
that courage is not the willingness to kill; it’s the willingness to risk
ourselves for the greater good, and that is arguably something that everyone can do when we convert our
anger into fuel for nonviolent struggle. We have been conditioned to think that
such attitudes are naïve by the continuous hum of violence that surrounds us -
its proximity and acceptability in daily life. But maybe that noise is also
drowning out the voices of those who could show us that nonviolence really works?

Nonviolence is not passivity - it is immensely active and challenging.
But practicing nonviolence enables us to see more deeply into the heart of the
problems that face us all, and it helps us to escalate our nonviolent efforts
in ways that are more informed, sophisticated and courageous. To echo Buckminster Fuller,
“You never change things by fighting the
existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the
existing model obsolete.”